Hey guys, it's been awhile. I was wondering if Exact Audio Copy was still the killer quality app for ripping audio discs? Thanks.

Well, AFAIK, PlexTools is similar when used with Plextor drives.

Personally I think it's still king.

IMHO it's still king.

ZOMG TOC #8!
NEEDS MORE ABX!

what, its not something that is applicable to ABXing, so I hope that was a joke. Its completely supjective as other apps are able to give accurate rips as well, but other then plextools I dont know of any that let you know how accurate.

IMHO, EAC is still king! Plextools is the only comp, and only supports plex drives, isnt free, doesnt support AccurateRip,...

i think the use of zomg clearly indicates he was joking

What better are you expecting than perfect rips?

J River Media Center has a reliable secure ripping system with rip logging. It bypasses possible drive caching automatically. When reading a sector it can make up to 16 retries before going on. (This is limited by design to speed up things. 16 retries is usually enough for getting reliable data if possible at all).

It does not have all options EAC has, but for standard multiple file ripping (separate track files) it is quite capable and easy to use.

Though, I rip usually with EAC because I archive my CDs in the disc image & cue file format.

An alternative. EAC is terrific, but it also closed-source and windows-only.

Thanks for the responses guys!

I use EAC exclusively. Updates are sort of infrequent but what do you expect in such an expertly-written freeware application? I'd even consider paying for it when it is fully-developed. Thanks AW!

Fully developed? What's that? Version 1.0? In year 2024 or thereabout....?

foobar2000 0.9 beta/RC has a very good ripper built in.

It offers offset correction, "paranoid mode", which requires four identical readings to consider the data correct, can work correctly with drives with up to 2 MB of internal cache (AFAIK) and - for me - works much faster and copes much better with copy protected discs (think Cactus Data Shield ). EAC is often useless for them. I know, I tried.

As far as I know, Peter added secure ripping to foobar because EAC's two identical readings were sometimes not enough when dealing with nastier copy protections. I agree - I often got clicks in the files.

And - for unprotected but scratched CDs, foo gives me identical results as EAC does. CRCs match perfectly.

Definitely worth a try, even if one would use it only for this single task.

wow i didnt know foobar 0.9 had a nice ripper built in too now. i havent tried the newest one yet cause im happy with 8.3 and not fond of beta stuff but wow foobar is really becoming a MAJOR application in that it offers so much for so little.

the only alternative to EAC i use right now probably doesnt count, but i use audiograbber for strictly mp3 copies and eac when i want flacs. i figger a few errors in an mp3 copy aint no big deal.

foobar 0.9 beta is more stable than a lo of "fully developed" apps.

Even EAC is "prebeta", mind you.

Why don't you rip to FLAC and MP3 at the same time?

Moderation: Removed unneccessary quotes.

Really?

Moderation: Removed unneccessary quotes.

Try it

for open source and non windows rippers, your best two alternatives are probably grip, and a ha.org member's very own RubyRipper.

Right, but the population on here is disproportionally biased to Win32 applications. I have to continously keep adding applications for other platforms in the wiki as the ratio of rippers for instances is 5:1

fb2k's ripping capabilities don't impress me much... there's no log creation (I don't consider fb2k's console output to be on a par with EAC's log) and ripping of the same CD (has some errors) took longer (paranoid mode). The secure ripping is nothing revolutionary anymore, there are many audio CD rippers already which can do that, fb2k is just another one of them.

But the most important reason why I still prefer EAC over fb2k is that only EAC is capable of making 1:1 copies, and I don't mean the actual audio data, which should be perfect and bit identical with both but I mean the information about the Audio CD's layout. Apparently fb2k can't deal with cue sheets very well since beta 7. It's not only EAC's non-compliant cue sheet and multiple track rips that can't be bit-compared positively anymore to a single image equivalent rip with post beta 6 releases, also gap information is simply omitted in the cue sheet when creating an "album image with cue sheet" no matter if "detect gaps" was used or not. Kind of odd in my opinion, why adding cue sheet creating to fb2k anyway when they're of no use in their original sense. I know, one can create single file CD images while still being able to play single tracks out of it in case the output format doesn't support "chapters".

If you want to make 1:1 copies of Audio CD's stick to EAC. But if you just want to do secure rips and only encode the tracks to multiple files later for convenient listening then you don't need a cue sheet anyway and fb2k should be perfect, especially if it's already your main audio player/tool.

EDIT: Ok, to be fair. This will change in the future and fb2k will be able to do 1:1 copies as well. The way the cues are created in 0.9RC (2006-02-24) is not intended it's a bug. So for the moment, there's no Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi!

Yeah, I use EAC exactly to do just that: Copy cd's to images with cue sheets. I find it works really well. And, I don't feel like learning how to use another program, so I'm sticking with it.

CD Architect. So far, best results I got. (Still had some artefacts with EAC, even after fine tuning.)

What? for those cds where they have intentionally put errors into the sub-codes, you could re-read that cd 1 million times, the errors are constant...

0.9 RC1 handles pregap information perfectly.

But fb2k is not a substitute for EAC yet. Some polycarbonate plastic discs with EMI labels on them cannot safely be ripped at all yet :-P

Discussion about pregap handling in foobar2000 moved here.

Theoretically - yes. The practice seems to differ, however. The words you quoted were Peter's own and this was the reason he added paranoid mode. It made a difference for him.

For me, it makes it, too. With EAC, I get (got, since I have a new drive ATM) clicks. With foobar - no clicks found and ripping took about 30 minutes instead of about 13 hours (EAC + Lite-On DVD drive then).

Probably YMMV.


@ Garf: Thanks for the info. But it's a real life-saver with some discs, nonetheless. And "yet" in your post looks promising.

Regards.

Definitely.

On my setup (ripper=EAC, drive=Plextor PX4012A), ripping a CP disc can be slow, but not 13 hours slow! Maybe 3 hours for Radiohead's "Hail To The Thief".

The behaviour of copy controlled CDs is extremely variable. For example, my Plextools Pro went into 70 CU errors on the first track of Kraftwerk - Tour de France 2003 single (no audible clicks), while it counted more than 7000 CU errors in the same part of Within Temptation - Mother Earth (awful pairs of clicks all the time, with EAC as well as Foobar paranoid extraction).
And both CDs are copy controlled with Cactus Datashield 200 !

They are not CD's They're not even marked as such. I wish they wouldn't sell them at CD stores though, it's confusing.

We have several which won't actually play in CD players without major glitching. The ripped copies are fine, though...why do we bother buying music, again?

It's the best ripping program, because of it's accuracy; and it would be the best writing program too, but for a major bug: it won't burn text information (for most CD burners). Fix that CD text problem, and it would be the best of both worlds.

Yes, that's the one. CDS200.5.0.151/5.00.160 in that case. What a fricking PITA...


@ Garf: No, they're not, indeed. I've been wondering this myself, too...


@ NeoRenegade: All the newer Lite-Ons have an uncorrected_for_centuries firmware glitch, preventing EAC from spinning the CD up to high speed in secure mode. 13 h is in such a case a very real scenario.

That is why we have Burst Mode and Test and Copy.
That should do fine in 90%+ of ripping cases.

Thank God.

...maybe there are even hacked firmwares around for those Lite-on drives...??? I wouldn't be surprised.

EAC doesn't rip perfectly in all cases (at least one has no gurantee), but I guess no ripper actually doeas that.

I have reproduced the following "error" twice (within 700 rips)

Secure mode, test & copy, a hard track, first atempt Checksum A + B, second attempt, checksum A+C, third attempt, checksum C+D. Third atempt Checsum A + A, but how do i know that checksum C isnt correct? Also that checksum has occured more than once.

(In reality it often takes a lot more tries, but i just made a short example for illustration of the problem).

AtW

ROFL

Really, which drives are you talking about ?

At least my LTR-52246S and SOHR-5238S don't have that bug.

Nope.

I kindly asked the Codeguys, resident hackers at CDFreaks and they told me they could not figure out a way to do it.